the distinct end of poetry

V-WAKE

The distinct end of poetry is beauty.

& beauty is wholeness, radiance

& harmony, per Stephen Dedalus

– out of Aquinas (Aristotle too, maybe).

Beauty, rounding on itself… dimensional

& resonant.  Unlike the trodden

thoroughfare of explanation,

abstraction (utilitarian, impersonal)

& then Truth stands there, facing you –

smiling, breathing! – the mimesis

resolves at its moral crisis – the

peripeteia of heroine & hero flow through

& it’s all too real, this thunderstorm

in your heart – when Lear

& Cordelia meet again (in fear

& trembling) at the obliteration of all form

all kindly grace, all courtesy & charity

beneath tromping beast-breath

& mincing m’carnal serpent-teeth

– until you hear the tingle of the mercy-

bell (so slight, so bright, so still).  So

I would defend the poets’ cause;

manifest those subtle laws

(human & divine) by which they fulfill

their milky icons, walking through stone

as in an Easter season

at the Great Sabbath Even

when Mary goes to the tomb (afraid, alone)

                         *

& meets the shy gardener (Ever-Living One).

So I would elicit my own

testimony (prodigal son) – &

body forth a pregnant Henry maze, spun

from that seedy Emperor in mid-July

who loved Our American Cousin –

swan-diving into Frisco basin,

branding his heart with fiery Never-Die.

& under the aegis of that orthodox St. Maximus

I would retrace the delicate brushwork

Marsden Hartley (in his Moby Dick

memorial) marked 33 – sea-terminus

or Ocean-birth, Jonah or sepulcher…

black hole or vanishing point,

centering thin, small (paint-

brush) horsehair… your Jerusalem Chamber.

Everything resolving now, in the master play

when Prince Hal meets his father

– O recreant & fickle feather!

Arrogant betrayer!  This your day, boy –

clasp your virulent & blood-soaked crown!

For the rêve-songe in the river-

valley of our May-King quivers

in a V-wake – groans with a birth – your own!

When the Eagle of mute Joachim molts into Dove

& Mammon-prone America restores

Columbia – & when the sun soars

in the oak-bole, & Cordelia mimes… LOVE.

4.17.20

Looked again (on coffee break) into RS Crane, Languages of criticism and the structure of poetry (U. Toronto, 1953). This is the real deal, esp. the third essay ("The languages of contemporary criticism").

Seriously, this will change your way of seeing things.

If I have time to quote some passages, I will.

Aristotle saw things differently.

Crane shows how the standard method of 20th-cent. criticism was so pervasive, you couldn't se that there were other approaches.

The standard method assumed "poetry" is one big thing, a kind of discourse, and you defined "it" by differentiating it from other kinds of discourse (but all these kinds are still cousins : all "discourse", "language-usage").

Aristotle saw these very unique & specific activities which people did which came to be called "poetry". Tragic, comic, epic were sharply differentiated from one another, & from other genres. They weren't "modes of discourse" : they were forms of an art of imitation.

Then he investigates their structure & shape, to discover how they create that specific power & beauty he calls "imitation".

I'm really not succeeding here in transmitting Crane's very valuable insights.

The "art of imitation" (in dramatic/epic poetry) is structured, not with discourse, but upon the armature of plot.

[I know I'm repeating some things I tried to describe a few months ago. I'm just going back in that direction.]

Notes Toward & So On (9)

If, then, we follow the logic of the Addendum below... poetry includes realia - symbolic facts, factual symbols - with something of a different purpose than does history.

History recounts the truths of what happened on behalf of knowledge & its truth.

Poetry transmits its truths so that it may suffuse them with feeling. Emotional truth.

Oh-oh. This sounds like another pitfall. There were lots of intellectual propounders of the last 2 centuries who were eager to limit poetry to "feeling" (while serious grown-up minds focused on the "thought" of reality - scientific, political, social, etc).

Which brings us full circle, back to the substance of the poetic image - that fusion of intellect and feeling, head & heart - that sense of things, around and about the borders of which Coleridge, Blake, Dickinson, Whitman, Hopkins, Eliot, Stevens & so many others wrote with such authority, with the ring of emotional rightness.

addendum #2: & this still doesn't get it right. Because art also presents symbolic facts as a form of mimesis - perhaps at least as accurate, exact & true, in its way, as any other form of discourse.

I could quote RS Crane all day (Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry). In one passage, he talks about how, with Aristotle anyway, it's useless to consider "pleasure" in the abstract, as an "end" or purpose of poetry. Pleasure is always conjoined with particular forms of activity, and is characterized by them. Then, in a paragraph, he telescopes the historical development of mimetic poetry, from basic human pleasure in imitations & mimicry, to the moral distinction between imitation of things admired ("better people") and things satirized ("worse peope"), to the practice of a Homer, in which a complete, integral form has been found to subsume many forms of imitation:

"...finally to have eventuated, with Homer, in self-contained works of art the final cause of which is beauty rather than either the general pleasurableness or the moral utility of imitations... It is indeed a final end in two important senses - in the sense that it is an end peculiar to the poetic art rather than one imitative poetry shares with other arts or activities, and also in the sense that it subsumes the other ends of pleasing and instructing, and goes beyond them. For it is distinctive of poetry such as Homer's that it utilizes the pleasure we all take in imitation and rhythm, and the vivid interest we have in other human beings and especially in the moral issues in which they can be involved, in order to make objects which we can continue to appreciate, after our first curiosity is satisfied, for the sake of their intrinsic rightness and beauty. This therefore is where poetic theory, in its normative aspect, in general must begin..." (pp. 64-65)

Seems that among the Chicago School notions I've been following, the one that interests me the most is this concept of the poem as an artificial-imitative construct. RS Crane makes it clear that Aristotle, anyway, is being very specific in the Poetics - is not talking about all kinds of poetry. And "imitation" does not equal "realism" - does not mean an attempt to "faithfully reflect" a stable external reality. Mimesis in poetry is a verbal artifice or autonomous creation, reflecting the poet's inner concept of an action (the plot) and its consequences & implications. Part of the interest (pleasure, etc.) derived from such a production does involve our ability to identify & understand the action, and the characters involved - thus it requires an element of verisimilitude (the characters are either "better than us" (epic, tragedy), "worse than us" (comedy), etc.). But there is no simple equation of experience and the art work; the poem is a selection & recreation of events - real or imagined - in a completely artificial medium.

We might be able to extrapolate, from the ways an audience absorbs & responds to a dramatic poem or an epic poem, to the action(s) or purposes of poems in general. This seems to be what's happening when Elder Olson or RS Crane talk about how the diction & verbal texture are only one element - and perhaps not the most important one - of a poem's structure. They refer to Coleridge's criticism - the way he balances considerations of verbal effects with the nature of the poem's argument, theme, "thought" - the images & concepts evoked by the words. Like Aristotle, Coleridge thinks about poems as imaginative wholes or unities - this unity as being perhaps the foremost structural element, the formal resolution, of its overall beauty, radiance, claritas. Here the notion of fitness or decorum comes into play: the verbal texture in each of the poem's parts must relate fittingly to the subject-matter & contribute to the total effect. (Coleridge distinguished poetry from prose as having pleasure, rather than truth, as its end, and as being beautiful, not only as a whole, but independently in each of its parts.)

A "didactic" poem does not imitate an action. But mimesis plays a role in all poetry, lurking in the imaginative indications, implications, inferences, suggestions of every figure & trope.

So if we start thinking about poems as imaginative/conceptual/mimetic wholes - representing & imitating actions and "mental actions" (choices: decisions about things) - then, it seems to me, this opens up new ways to read. & I mean read whatever little book of poetry you have in front of you.

Responding to John Latta's notes on "ambiguous figures":

yes, the characteristic quality of poetry is its reflexivity (its way of being something rather than simply pointing to something); but the shortcoming of so much postmodern poetry is that it simply turns this into a dichotomy ("poetry must not be mimetic since it is reflexive, self-mirroring"). What happens then is it gets further and further from ordinary experience & feeling, accenting its function as intellectual game.

The real puzzle, it seems to me, is how poetry can be both mimetic & reflexive.

I am interested in something I brought up a few days ago, this question of the image as a complex of feeling and intellect. & how the poem or song creates the conditions - sets the stage - for a symbolic or dramatic expression of the image.

I'm thinking of the image-complex itself as a subset or reflection-in-miniature - a dramatic re-presentation - of a larger whole, a life-complex, let's say: the complex or "whole" which is experience per se. Mimetic holism.

And the relation of these aspects to style: the values of clarity, simplicity, order, intelligibility, emotive-expressive power. Because the deep & moving experiences - or recognitions - of life can display not only subtlety and mystery, but also a resolving, overwhelming simplicity of thought & feeling. (Not to mention the simplicity in mundane ordinary everydayness!) I'm saying poetry has a right to be simple and direct as well as original and obscure.

We live in an amazing "Alexandrian" age of multiple discourses, each of which can quite easily form its own worlds of self-referentiality. So perhaps the most important intellectual tool of the practicing poet is his or her private sense of an interlocutor, a listener.

Probably a lot of the bitterness and frustration of poets has to do with their own muddled sense of who they want to address.

... so: poetic mimesis is the "objective" representation of a non-objective reality. Do I contradict myself? No - that's why you call your topic, your subject!

Assignment : make a replica of a mirror, including all it reflects, while looking at it in a mirror. (You may request assistance from Roger van der Weyden).

Mandelstam : "the word is Psyche."

The (non-semi-annual) Monthly Henry Report

What's up with this Henry? Well, I've been able to write short poems. Haven't been able to do that for years, until now.

& lately, my readings of Nicholas Cusanus, & various books about painting, etc. (& seeing paintings), have given me the sensation, anyway, of beginning to formulate... not a poetics, or a theory, exactly... but a new (for me) conception...

I feel very close to Wallace Stevens these days. But it's as though I'm thinking on a complementary track. That is, where he thinks of poetry - the "supreme fiction" - as an adequate replacement for the belief in God - for the mythopoetic mind which has always created that profound figment (I almost wrote "fogment") -

I tend to understand the mirroring and mimetic function of art - which creates holistic abstracts of reality - as the only adequate means of expressing religious meaning: that is, a vision which allows even for the possibility (or the possibility of an adequate representation) of a "sacred" order or "divine" reality or "logos" or "wholeness" experience.

Why am I putting these words in "quotes"? For the very same reason I write poetry : because prose provides an inadequate argument for, or representation of, what I understand to be "reality".

This does not mean I think poets are special people, or all poetry is sacred, or any of that baloney.

I have a lot more to say about this mirroring or mimetic function, but it is so cool that I am putting it in my poetry as much as possible, rather than spelling it out, at the moment.

What else is happening? I am very happy to be blogging my poems. It has given me renewed faith in blog poetics. I think poetry bloggers are the Walt Whitmans of today. Blogs have the potential to redirect the editorial & critical function of contemporary literature (specifically, poetry - fiction is too much to read online) more directly to the reader. Hi, Ron.

My longstanding haggle with Language Poetry & post-avantism (admittedly a form of shadow-boxing with my own peculiar version of those amorphous phenomena). . .

a crux there being that a kind of littery literalism of the letter became a cliche or dogma over the 80s & 90s. . . & one of its affects being that the trope of self-conscious literalism (even as irony) tends to disrupt representation or mimesis. . .

so there is no "walking through the pictures" anywhere. . .

which seems to attack or cancel out perhaps the most interesting aspect of art in general, which is the oscillation between art & nature - the mimicry & confusion of the two. . . & the theological mystery at the root of this oscillation (what is "creation from nothing"?).

so it's interesting to me anyway that the theme of "Byzantium" runs through much of my writing in the late 90s (both in a political sense of US being a latter-day or parodic Byzantium, and in the sense that the old Byzantine aesthetic/theological issue of iconoclasm/iconophilia is so fascinating in itself). . .

I think of the post-avants & the postmodern theorists as iconoclasts (in the Byzantine sense). . .

& the aesthetic values which got sidelined during this period of iconoclasm included representation, mimesis, "thick description", direct presentation, narrative, etc. . . things I've been interested in. . .

(- just a little horn-tootin' polemics, for a Friday afternoon in frozen Blogland. . .)

. . . But whence cometh this bicameral poetics? I don't think it's simply self-interested polemics. The deeper fault line probably goes back to John Donne's era. When God was no longer understood as Love & Knowledge together, the split between Love & Knowledge, Faith & Science, began. A gradual breakdown of the idealist concept of Nature & the Good, so that the beginning of the 20th century witnessed the final flip-over, the revolutionary displacement of Apollonian by Dionysian humanity : "love" understood philosophically & psychologically as only a veil for subconscious desire, the ideal countered by the anti-ideal, the "knowing", the disenchanted.

The effect of these thought-movements on art was of course manifold : art's basic drive to depict or reflect was no longer guided by an accepted or singular logos or mythology; it began to depict chaos & disorder. The "order" imposed by Modernism is an order of the autonomous artifact.

Such order based on the thing-in-itself sets up a fundamental division between artifact and communication. Perhaps it is this basic division - between the urge to "make" a wholistic thing/machine/poem on the one hand, and the urge to communicate fact, truth, values, on the other - which is reflected in the partisanship of "mainstream" & "experimental".

(Meanwhile the agon between Apollonian and Dionysian - between a verbalized icon of the Ideal and a representation of the commanding power of Desire - sets up an endless productive/empty tumult, since, ironically, the heart's desire is not satisfied by either of them : neither by a detached verbal formula of the Good, nor a worldview framed by impersonal, deterministic hedonism, ie. fulfillment through sensuality.)

Fluttering about Flaublog. Reminds me of little lame Pantaloon-man's query/comment about whether there is something substantial in the connection between the work & the life in considering poetry - whether poets "teach" by exemplary life, not only in their works (at least I think that was what JK was pondering at the time).

Steve "owes me $15" Evans is right that the sociability of blogging tends against the solitude needed for some kinds of thinking & writing. Didn't "Shirley Bean" leave off blogging for just that reason? ON T'OTHER HAND, blogging cain't be rudduced to critical expository pose.

Seems to me more like a curious wallow in the realities of office downtime communication, an interstice which allows for expanded creative acting-up or self-presentation. Thus the pleasant VARIETY of blahgpo acts. Which to my thinkin' circles around again to JK's question. Jordan, by the way, sounds almost Sillimanesque in his defense of blogging as political (see "tense/unheeded" comments of yesterday). But is poetry political? Damn straight - so's the Pope.

I tend to agree that the poetry & the poet are inseparable. This doesn't mean we have to delve with vulgar curiosity into the biographical mulch. I think all I'm saying is that the "public informality" of blogging reinforces the presence of poet In Persona qua poet. Words are darn pow'rful, as my Uncle Ned used to say on the porch. Many authors have a curiously impersonal approach to writing - even poets. For them literature is a form of channeling - the results vary depending on talent & scruples. Blogging in an interesting way combines power (of language) & informality (diaries, letters, conversation). In that combination lies the odd feeling of personal presence & immediacy which blogging provides.

I realize I'm rambling. I think whut I'ma tryin to say is that deep down I have a hunch that poetry is NOT channeling - either of accepted power-hegemonic social discourses (cultural or subcultural), or of exemplary classic models. & why not ?? because deep down the person & the word are indistinguishable. The vocation of the writer transmutes or fuses person & word. The poet stands with her or his word to the end of time & none other's - the rest is echo chamber, channeling, feedback, follow the signs please. & the informal immediacy of blogging perhaps reinforces that impression. It gets back to what I was theorizing way back in Jan or Feb about poetry versus prose as illustrated by poetic NOWNESS vs prose MIMESIS.

Either that, or blogging is just another kind of ego tripping. That too. Shorter Wanted Posters Wanted, Shorty.